Questions from the community, and answers from the dev, from the main BCT thread

Question
Hi tonych,
After this 25th snapshot, byteball and blackbytes will be distributed as per the rules you announced.
Byteball will be send to linked byteball addresses that reside on "byteball public DAG", I can understand this is completely asynchronous process..
What I cannot understand is about blackbytes distribution:

1. Is it an automatic or interactive process (need human intervention)?
2. Will byteball client with the linked keys on peoples computers need to be left running to receive these coins?
   Thanks again.

Answer:
1) It is automatic.
2) Not necessary, you'll see both bytes and blackbytes as soon as you start the wallet after the coins are sent out.
- tonych

Question:
Tonych, is the model sort of proof of service? Those that relay the activity and transactions get rewarded some bytes? I read the whitepaper but still am looking for some sort of understanding of this.
Answer:
It is not a proof-of.
The collected fees are split between regular users who are first to extend the DAG and witnesses who help define the order of transactions.
-tonych

Question:
Why it is not instant? say if there are 1000 tx per second in the network, my transaction once done will be covered within a second by 50 other transactions, isn't that after 1 second my transaction will have 50 confirmations? If we put 10 confirmations as confirmed, isn't my tx is confirmed after less than 1 sec?
Answer:
Perhaps you got used to hear about N confirmations in Bitcoin. There is no such thing here, your transaction is either final or not. And getting covered advances it to being final. Getting covered by witnesses matters most (the structure of the DAG after your transaction also matters for finality). Witnesses earn fees from transactions they cover, and the more transactions per second there are in the network, the more frequently witnesses will post with positive ROI (they pay fees like everybody else).

You will never get sub-second confirmation times because of network latency.
-tonych

Question:
OK so if I got it correctly, then if the transaction are covered by more than half witnesses' transactions it will be final thus confirmed? Are witnesses always emit transactions? What if none of the witness are doing tx? my tx will never get confirmed?
Answer:
It'll do as a very rough approximation, see the white paper for the exact criteria of finality.
Witnesses are expected to always emit transactions, that's one of the factors that determines the choice of witnesses.
-tonych

Question:
This is interesting question. Suppose, each of 12 witnesses run a script which submit transactions at crazy rate, but nobody else is using the network at this time. What happens then? Do witnesses end up loosing money?
Answer:
Witnesses do post transactions automatically but do it in a bit more reasonable way https://github.com/byteball/byteball-witness/blob/master/start.js
-tonych

Question:
is there any way planned to increase marketing apart from the sig campaign ?
I think this project will only succeed if we have a lot of users.
Answer:
Any suggestions are welcome.
We have sig campaign, twitter campaign, and a recent press release which resulted in a few publications.
-tonych

Question:
Quick Question; can we link multiple BTC addresses to our one Byteball address by sending the micro transaction from each BTC address, and do we have to run the Transition Bot each time?
Answer:
You can (if you can control which address the payment is sent from, this is an advanced feature). You just send the same micro-amount to the same address.
-tonych

Reply:
Incidentally, I finished developing our trustless exchange bot a day ago, just when you started this discussion. How did you know?
It will exchange only internal assets, not a replacement for poloniex etc.
-tonych
Question:
Please provide some more details? how to use it? what internal assets you meant? Is it blackbyte? I don't see any other internal assets...
Answer:
I'll release it in a few days, need to make a few changes to the wallet too.
This version of the exchange will work with public assets only, blackbytes are private.
tonych